Rehabilitation Programme for Vervet Monkeys

The VMF [Vervet Monkey Foundation] has over many years
developed and pioneered a new approach to the
rehabilitation of orphaned vervet monkeys.

In 1998 we announced our unique rehabilitation
programme that incorporated the use of large electrified
enclosures that are natural, and by using introduction
enclosures, we had formed within this natural
system, large viable troops, that would be re-introduce
into protected vervet forest reserves.

Our rehabilitation centre is designed to handle
orphaned vervet monkeys of all ages and more
specifically designed to cope with large numbers
of babies that become orphaned each year this has been made possible with international volunteers and gap year students getting involved .
Babies are easily assimilated into our programme
and we try to get as many of them out of the
hands of the public and into our care.
To date, we have successfully rehabilitated
hundreds of babies. They were rehabilitated
and raised within a natural environment and
retained a high degree of their natural fear
of humans.

Our programme can return an orphaned
baby monkey back into a wild state in four to
eight weeks, this is achieved by introducing
a baby to a female in one of our resident troops
living in natural environments at our centre.

Rehabilitation Protocol

Our protocol is to treat every monkey as an
individual. Monkeys are highly intelligent
primate mammals and they need expert handling
which is achieved by qualified handlers, volunteers and long term staff and the success of this
programme is due to this fact.

The monkeys we handle come from different backgrounds
and thus have been brought up in different environments
and therefore are treated differently thorugh
their acclimatisation period before they can
be integrated into a troop structure. For
example, some grow up in homes, others in cages,
some are well cared for while others are abused,
some suffer from malnutrition from having been
fed the incorrect diet when a baby etc.

There are factors we have no control over such
as - the numbers of monkeys that get handed
into our care, the age groups as well as gender
of the monkeys that come into our program.
As numbers can vary we are flexible and more
importantly we have the knowledge and can adapt
wherever possible to ensure the best mix possible.